On last week's earnings call, apartment landlord Equity Residential mentioned that the two US markets most impacted by a delayed return to office appear to be San Francisco and Seattle. They went on to say that San Francisco is the only market in which they operate where rents have not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

According to Bloomberg (which is relying on employee swipe-card data), office utilization in the San Francisco area is sitting at around 25% as of October 20, 2021. This is compared to a national average of around 37%. The obvious rationale here is that large tech companies have delayed their return to office and/or been more aggressive in adopting remote/hybrid work.

Looking at these numbers, it is clear that as someone who has been going into the office every day since the start of summer, I am currently in the minority.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it plans to return to an "office-centric culture" as its baseline. Its rationale was that being in an office allows the company to better "invent, collaborate, and learn together." All of this was laid out in an announcement that was distributed to its teams globally. On the other end of the spectrum, Twitter continues to double down on working from home. The company, which is currently hiring, is even trying to target talent that may be disgruntled by the fact that their current company is planning for them to return to the office. Two very different approaches. So which one is right?

This is, of course, a great debate right now and the right answer probably depends on a myriad of different factors, some of which are likely specific to the company. Dror Poleg has been trying to think through this problem with something he calls the talent equation (because it's all about talent). It works like this: level of in-person interaction x overall size of talent pool = innovation and financial success. The basis behind this equation is pretty simple. In-person interaction is great for business. This much we know. But you also need the right talent interacting. Allowing remote work is one way of expanding the size of your talent pool. But again, you do this at the expense of in-person interaction.

In-person interaction is what makes cities the great organisms that they are. And I believe firmly in this side of the equation over the long-term. Even right now I find that when I go into the office, my call and Zoom volumes go down dramatically and I have more time to think, collaborate, and do, you know, actual work. This is because many interactions don't require a Zoom meeting when you're in the office. You stop by someone's desk. You ask a thing (usually pretty quickly). And then you go off and action that thing. But I also acknowledge that for some companies, access to the right talent -- and lots of it -- may be a real challenge, particularly in smaller cities.

Like Amazon, I am a supporter of office-centric work cultures. But I do think that Poleg's talent equation is a useful way to think about this debate right now.

Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash

I was speaking with a writer from the Globe & Mail today about the future of office. We were half talking about a new AAA strata office building -- called Capital Point -- that we (Slate) are in the midst of launching in the Metrotown neighborhood of Burnaby, BC. And we were half talking about whether or not we're all going to return to offices.

This is one of the great debates of the pandemic but, as I mentioned in my 2021 predictions post, I think it's overblown. The longer I work from home and spend my entire day on video calls (only to start actual work in the evening), the more I become convinced that this is a suboptimal arrangement for productivity, collaboration, personal motivation, employee morale, and talent retention (among many other things).

We have complete conviction around great offices in the right locations. That's why Amazon and whoever else continue to build. They're rightly looking past this period of dislocation (12-24 months of suck). Again, this is not to say that there won't be some changes and that certain pre-existing trends haven't been accelerated, because they have been. But I believe that humans will continue to cluster for work.

In fact, it's hard to disentangle cities and offices. Cities are labor markets. It's where agglomeration economies take hold and where people come to improve their socioeconomic standing in the world (as well as meet people and have fun). To say that we no longer need to come together in person for work is to say, in a way, that we no longer need cities. We can all decentralize.

That is not a bet that I am prepared to make.

For more information about Capital Point and to register for the project, click here.